I’ve also had that feeling that the recipe is impinging on my voice or my sensitivity in the kitchen. It’s kind of the fear of our agency being overruled. But really, it’s a turning away from the underlying knowledge that we’re always engaging with the knowledge and labor of others.

Small Fires: An Epic in the Kitchen - Hardcover - AbeBooks Small Fires: An Epic in the Kitchen - Hardcover - AbeBooks

I requested Small Fires from NetGalley because of the description of this shorter novel, and so I express my deep gratitude to whomever wrote the blurb as it is in no way misleading or misfocused. It’s not a deeply normative editing process. We’re not trying to iron out the voice, the difference; we’re trying to make the difference sing in its best form. When I freelanced, I learned to self-censor: This isn’t appropriate because this is too weird. With the book, I tried to totally write against that. I’d spent years just taking all this out, so I tried to allow it to stay in. Small Fires reinvents cooking – that simple act of rolling up our sleeves, wielding a knife, splattering red hot sauce on our books – as a way of experiencing ourselves and the world. Cooking is thinking: about the liberating constraint of tying apron strings; the meaning of appetite and bodily pleasure; the wild subversiveness of the recipe; the power of small fires burning everywhere. A bracingly original, revelatory debut that explores cooking and the kitchen as sources of pleasure, constraint and revolution, by a rising star in food writing I did get quite entangled in theory in the first half of the book, and I wrote the second half of the book by hand. I was like, I want to write a book that is about a kind of knowledge that comes through the body — why am I just sitting up here in this room looking at theory and not in the kitchen, not being in the body? Then I went and cooked the sausages and did that chapter about [psychoanalyst D.W.] Winnicott.

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The recipe is such a complex thing. Like, where is the recipe, and what is the recipe? Because the recipe isn’t always text. We now most commonly encounter recipes as texts in books, but it’s an annotation of a gestural process of the body. Even if you’re trying to follow a recipe exactly, and maybe even if you think you have no culinary skills whatsoever, the body finds ways of interjecting anyway, about at what point you stop cooking and whether you like the amount of salt or sugar.

Small Fires,’ Rebecca May Johnson Rethinks - Eater In ‘Small Fires,’ Rebecca May Johnson Rethinks - Eater

The ‘lovely’ chapter also draws into focus this book’s engagement with The Odyssey. And it does make academia’s general failure to take recipes seriously as texts or histories seem absolutely almost impossible to comprehend, a recipe being a catalogue of the ways in which people interact with the land (and supply chains) accessible to them, and the ways in which, through effort and combination, they sought to transform and transcend those limitations. Which is where I think, in the recipe’s smallness and (seeming) simplicity, the ‘epic’ truly enters.I did a workshop with loads of translators from all over the world, and I asked them to cook the recipe. What they did wasn’t what was in the text. They had done lots of things slightly differently. They said they tried to follow the recipe, and it made them realize how much they change texts when they translate without even consciously being aware of it. It’s hard to follow a recipe exactly. The body and your feelings: There are so many minor interventions that change it. We know that food writing can encompass so many ideas, but I think there is still a sense of limitation in the form, from what we know and from what already exists. How did you get past those limitations to write this weird food book?

Kitchen Is a Place In Rebecca May Johnson’s First Book, the Kitchen Is a Place

While the book largely focuses on one dish (a seemingly simple tomato sauce), it tells of the variations and how a recipe is not really a one-time use or rendition of something. It has history and changes based on the smallest of things. The telling of the making of this dish is interspersed with the author's thoughts on cooking and the act of creating a meal, as well as the different works she has read and analyzed. An enjoyable book! About how we diminish the 'work' that goes into cooking in the name of 'love'. About recipes—what they bring to the table, what they don't, how we follow a recipe (to the dot, intuition, no measurement cooking etc. I def did not know about the 'no-recipe recipe book by New york Times editor Sam Sifton). Describing each cooking session as a performance. About Nigella Lawson's use of possessives in the way she describes her cooking and food. About MFK Fischer's thoughts on food. About navigating life through different hairstyles and food—the slow transformation.Fans of Korelitz’s deft literary mystery You Should Have Known will find plenty to relish in this character-driven tale of privilege, family dysfunction and belated personal growth. At its centre are the Oppenheimer triplets: smart, arrogant Harrison, overshadowed oddball Lewyn, and secretive Sally. The products of a marriage tethered to a tragic car crash years earlier, they were conceived via IVF; a fourth embryo was frozen, and on their departure for college in the year 2000, their mother has it thawed and enlists a surrogate, resulting in the birth of Phoebe, who will narrate the novel’s closing section. Each new twist triggers bright, witty insights into the complexities of sibling bonds as well as art, infidelity and more.

Small Fires: An Epic in the Kitchen - Goodreads

Menurut penulis, cooking is thinking (dan aku SANGAT setuju, cooking is also science). Memasak sama sulitnya dengan pekerjaan lain yang membutuhkan keahlian spesifik. Ya kita bisa memasak dengan cinta, namun bukan berarti kita dapat menyepelekan proses memasak itu sendiri. Stuff doesn’t get published with the conservative expectations of what food writing is and isn’t. It’s really cool to work somewhere where there’s latitude to push beyond those expectations and to bring my own interests as a reader to commissioning and to pay people a dignified amount of money to do that work. This joyful, revelatory work of memory and meditation both complicates and electrifies life in the kitchen. It shows us the radical potential of the thing we do every day: the power of small fires burning everywhere. Laurel (because I know you're reading this!)--there is so much about the Odessy (and specifically Emily Willson's translation of it!) in this (she studied it in school), you would love this!!!I particularly enjoyed the essay “Again and Again, There Is That You,” in which Johnson determinedly if chaotically cooks a three-course meal for someone who might be a lover. The mixture of genres and styles is inventive, but a bit strange; my taste would call for more autobiographical material and less theory. The most similar work I’ve read is Recipe by Lynn Z. Bloom, which likewise pulled in some seemingly off-topic strands. I’d be likely to recommend Small Fires to readers of Supper Club. Cooking is thinking! The spatter of sauce in a pan, a cook's subtle deviation from a recipe, the careful labour of cooking for loved ones: these are not often the subjects of critical enquiry. Cooking, we are told, has nothing to do with serious thought; the path to intellectual fulfilment leads directly out of the kitchen. In this electrifying, innovative memoir, Rebecca May Johnson rewrites the kitchen as a vital source of knowledge and revelation.